Hi Fi News June 2016

Welcome to a very special issue of your favourite hi-fi magazine as we mark three score years of reporting on the fi nest music and cutting-edge replay equipment. Over its 60 year span, Hi-Fi News bore witness to the birth of the stereo LP and the Compact Cassette, and documented the ascent of the digital era with CD, then SACD right up to the ‘highres’ streamed media of today. We’ve also reported on all those formats that lacked the same staying power – eighttrack, various quadraphonic matrices, DAT, DCC, MiniDisc and DVD-Audio to name a few key music carriers. Importantly it’s that foundation, that bedrock of accumulated knowledge, that ensures Hi-Fi News can be trusted to put its reviews of products and technology into the proper context. Hi-Fi News has also reflected…

Spring DragonFlys THE ORIGINAL PLUG-IN USB HUB-POWERED DAC IS REPLACED BY THE ‘NEXT GENERATION’ Some four years after its DragonFly DAC almost single-handedly kick-started the plug-in USB DAC/headphone market, AudioQuest has ‘evolved’ the design into two new models. Both models are less power-hungry than the original, ensuring compatibility with Apple and Android phones, and both will handle music fi les up to 96kHz/24-bit without downsampling. The £89 DragonFly Black features an ESS 9010 DAC chip with analogue volume control, much like the original DragonFly, with a maximum 1.2V output suited to medium/high sensitivity headphones. The £169 DragonFly Red is based around a higher-spec ESS 9016 DAC with a ‘bit-perfect’ digital volume control. Moreover its maximum output is a higher 2.1V, the extra ‘grunt’ conferring some advantage when driving lower sensitivity headphones. AudioQuest, 01249…

An annual fi xture on the Portuguese audio scene since 1990, the Audioshow has always been highly regarded both by local audiophiles and the representatives of the global companies who make their way to Lisbon every year. The attraction, in part, is the prospect of enjoying the city’s beautiful architecture and wonderful weather, but it’s the hi-fi that quickly sees everyone queuing to spend their days inside. For the fourth year in succession, the event took place at the fi ve-star Pestana Palace Hotel in the city, which is located inside what was once a palace, built at the beginning of the 20th century for the family of a highly successful cocoa trader. With over 5000 visitors through the doors over the three days of the event and such opulant surroundings,…

It was June 1956 that the first issue of Hi-Fi News hit the newstands. It was the idea of Miles Henslow, a relative veteran of the print world in that for some years previously he had been the publisher of Record News. According to John Crabbe, who would take over as editor of the magazine in 1965, Henslow was a ‘born bluffer’. To help launch HFN, Henslow had hired a chauffer-driven Rolls in which to visit a printer, so as to establish his fi nancial probity despite being broke. In the event, Henslow’s timing was excellent. The first London Audio Fair had taken place just two months earlier, Wharfedale had given the first demonstrations of live-versus-recorded sound in 1954 and since 1953, the record industry had gone over to stereo recording, with…

Music reviews and features have been a part of Hi-Fi News ever since John Crabbe joined as Technical Editor in 1962. He was our editor from 1965-82 and was passionate about classical music – Berlioz in particular, about whom he wrote a book, and whose music first ‘struck a chord’ during his early days at Decca’s Navigator company. But back in August 1953, HFN’s publisher Miles Henslow had also launched Record News, its very first issue with only 27 pages but with a team of 14 specialist reviewers (violinist Erich Gruenberg was one, the musicologist Hans Redlich another, and Deryck Cooke wrote for some years). Its aim was to list and evaluate new recordings, a theme which John emulated, introducing a music review section with a small team of anonymous writers. I…

AUDIO FILE Three-way, seven-driver floorstanding loudspeaker Made by: Monitor Audio Ltd, Raleigh, Essex Supplied by: Monitor Audio Ltd Telephone: 01268 740580 Web: www.monitoraudio.co.uk Price: £15,000 Monitor Audio’s PL500 II loudspeakers, the flagship of its heavily revised Platinum II line-up – and thus the company’s entire range – are big, make no mistake about it. Selling for £15,000 a pair, they stand a smidge under 1.85m tall, so are going to need a big room, preferably with a high ceiling, if their three-way, seven-driver confi guration is going to be allowed to do its thing. These are the most ambitious speakers in the Essex-based company’s history, and an all-new design – they may carry the same ‘II’ suffi x as the other models in the latest Platinum range but, unlike the PL100 II, PL200 II and PL300 II, they…